But starvation can make men lactate. In one Japanese concentration camp alone, there were 500 starved male prisoners-of-war who had significant breast development, and who were lactating. In fact, at the end of World War II, when prisoners-of-war were released from concentration camps, many thousands of cases of men lactating were recorded.It's all to do with hormones.

Before puberty, there is no observable difference between the breasts of boys and girls. But at puberty, the hormone estradiol in young girls starts off the process of growth and division in the tubular duct system of the breast, as well as causing changes in the nipples. This does not happen in young boys. But it has been found that breast development, identical to that which happens in girls, can be stimulated in boys, by the administration of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, in a ratio of about one to fifty.So you can "grow" a breast with the right hormones, but to make milk, you need hormones which are made in the brain. The most important of these is prolactin.

Now both men and women make the female hormone, oestrogen, and the male hormone, testoserone, and prolactin, but in different amounts. In the body, various hormones are constantly being made by various glands, and these hormones are constantly being broken down, for example, by the liver. So the blood level of any given hormone depends on how much is being made, and how much is being broken down.

In these starved men in the concentration camps, their glands had atrophied (or shrunk) a bit, so they were making less hormones. But in these men, the liver had shrunk enormously, so that it was quite unable to break down even the small amounts of various hormones that were released, and itís thought that this is how come the men grew breasts, and then lactated.

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